Doing something creative costs money. If you're in a band, you're paying for gas to get to and from practice and gigs, studio time, and all the bits and pieces of tech you need to sound good. If you're an artist, you're paying for your materials and maybe studio space. Even if you're doing a simple webcomic, blog, or fansite you're paying for bandwidth.

And, unfortunately, creative work doesn't pay very well until you're famous. And sometimes it doesn't pay very well even then. So what do you do to help support your habit/creative endeavors?

It turns out just about everybody loves owning cute little tchotchkes. Ones that are branded with some obscure, indie-cred logo, image or phrase they like is even better.

So, you start to sell stuff. T-shirts, pins, prints, CDs, Toys and cards are the obvious choices. But mouse pads, coffee mugs, baseball caps, plushies, posters, babies' onesies, messenger bags, and refrigerator magnets all have their fans. Furniture, jewels, costumes, food, hygiene products, and sporting gear are for those wanting to go overboard. In fact, anything that you can figure out how to stick a logo, character or catchphrase onto will do. That's "The Merch". The merchandise. The moneymaker. The stuff that pays the bills.

See also Crack Is Cheaper (an audience reaction to merchandise, in that fans can't stop buying it).

Examples:

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Anime And Manga

Gundam certainly qualifies, and may even outdo Evangelion in this regard. It was once estimated in the early 90's that Bandai had sold so many Gundam toys and models that on average, every single man, woman, and child in Japan owned at least one. And that doesn't count other merchandise like keychains, posters, shirts, and so on.

Neon Genesis Evangelion has a very strange and bipolar relationship with its marketing, even aside from the tone of the story. Allegedly, a fan once proudly told Hideaki Anno that he had sold all his university textbooks to buy more Eva merchandise. Anno called him an idiot and told him to study harder.

Fairy Musketeers gets a special mention as it literally started its life as a bonus OVA for a collectible figure. Following the unexpected success, the resultant TV show is chock full of blatant plot changes to accommodate merchandising.

Black★Rock Shooter was a similarly backwards merch-ifiying incident. At first, it was just a music video and vague character design with no further plans, but that quickly spawned an out-of-control merchandising and promoting spree, which eventually led to a game, OVA, and anime being created to keep the figures, plushies, shirts, posters, and who-knows-what-else selling. The merch still charges ahead of everything else; a figurine bundle with the anime DVD was announced before the anime was even halfway through airing.

Sailor Moon became such a franchise that branded merchandise still sells quite well with now-adult childhood viewers of both sexes, from Hot Topic man-sized Sailor Moon t-shirts to expensive 20th anniversary revival makeup sets, bras and panties.

Generally speaking, Anime are made to promote their Merch - BD sales won't cover their production costs, except for excessively popular anime which are few and far between. This phenomenon is lampshaded in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, which pokes fun at its own DVD bonuses.

Special mention must be made for character-driven Bishoujo Series, doubly so if Moe: one of the more popular Merch is dakimakura, or pillows with character image on it, which is usually rather risque. And it's not even limited to bishoujo; there exists dakimakura of Baki the Grappler and Golgo13.

Cars has become this for Pixar, with just after a few years of existence, became the sixth best-selling toy brand on the market, making $2 billion per year in merchandise. The sequel was arguably made based on the money made on the toys.

Much of the Disney Animated Canon films saw a fair amount of tie in products since the very beginning, with varying degrees of success.

While the first half of the Renaissance era films saw plenty of sales for their merchandise, the latter half was more hit and miss, with The Hunchback of Notre Dame merch quickly filling clearance racks after the film became a box office disappointment.

The Princess and the Frog and Tangled sold merch moderately well, and Disney had similar expectations for Frozen. When that film became a surprise smash, the toys were selling out, and Disney took months to catch up with the demand. Elsa was the breakoutCharacter, so her toys and costumes were the most sought out (getting massive markups on secondary markets).

In the late 1990s, Disney's new head of marketing saw a Disney on Ice and noticed so many girls were cosplaying as the princesses, but not through any official clothing. This got him the idea to make the Disney Princess line, which has been a multi-billion per-year idea since.

Films — Live-Action

George Lucas wanted creative control of his upcoming movie, so he agreed to drop his director's fee to keep the rights, including merchandising. 20th Century Fox was convinced his "space movie" would flop, so they agreed, thinking they just saved more money they would lose. To put it mildly, they chose...poorly. Adjusted for inflation, Star Wars: A New Hope is the third-highest-grossing movie of all time in the US, with $2.8 billion in total ticket sales. Star Wars merchandise makes that much money every year.

At the time, merchandising involved selling posters, tie-in books, maybe t-shirts. Star Wars is the reason you can get everything from promotional shoes to toothbrushes.

Producer Gary Kurtz notes in this article, "The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films."

And Lucas didn't fight to keep the merchandising rights because he was far-sighted and knew it would be profitable in the long run. He just wanted to be able to promote the film himself in case the studio gave it Invisible Advertising.

The reason why Lucas was able to make out like a bandit in merchandising was that Fox and its marketing partners had gotten seriously burned with the notorious flop, Doctor Dolittle in 1967 and merchandising for a feature film didn't seem worth the bother in 1977.

Kenner, the toy manufacturers, did not see Star Wars mania. They couldn't keep up the demand for tots, that the holiday season of 1977 became known as the year of the "Empty Box Campaign," when customers got merely coupons to buy the toys when they were made available.

Spaceballs spoofed this in so many ways, from putting the movie's name on every other product, to having Dark Helmet play with the action figures. See the page quote.

One of the reasons why there is so little merchandise is due to an agreement between George Lucas and the producers of Spaceballs.

The 1989 Batman movie is remembered for its deluge of merchandise, which arguably set the stage for the way subsequent superhero movies were marketed. It was estimated in 1992 that the movie had brought in around $500 million in merchandise sales.

The Lord of the Rings movies expanded their merch into replica weapons, shields, helmets, costumes, flags, pipes, and jewelry worn by the characters, along with the more prosaic buttons, pins, books, posters, mousepads, and t-shirts.

Tremors franchise offers In-Universe example. Let's say your hometown was attacked by giant subterranean monsters, who kill half of its inhabitants before being defeated by the other half. What do you do? Make money on it, of course! Over the course of subsequent movies and the TV series the main characters have become famous science and pop-culture personas, being featured in magazines and TV shows, starring in commercials and documentaries, opening theme parks, having the exclusive license and producing video games, comics, action figures and other merchandise based on the monsters. All while continuing to fight said monsters first occasionally (Tremors 2-3) and then on a weekly basis.

At one point, Jurassic Park uses the film's actual merchandise to portray the in-universe merchandise for the fictional theme park (which is also sort of an example of Off-the-Shelf FX).

There was a flood of Planet of the Apes Merch released in the mid-Seventies, intended to promote the TV series and theatrical re-release of the films. The show didn't last, but the merchandise proved vastly more profitable.

Did you hear they removed [Action Star]'s new toilet paper brand from the market? There were complaints that it was rough and tough and didn't take shit off anybody.

Live Action TV

Doctor Who has had some fairly serious Executive Meddling over the years to peddle more merch, as due to the ways The BBC is funded the best way to make huge amounts of money is through selling toys, both to the technical target audience of children and the more lucrative target audience of adult collectors. More transparent examples of this have occasionally caused controversy and dips in the show's quality:

From 1964 to about 1966 or so, "Dalekmania" (a Dalek craze created by how iconic and menacing the Daleks were) hit, and British stores were filled with toys, games, kids' clothing, cakes, Easter eggs, plates, Official Cosplay Gear, ice lollies, anything you can think of, all bearing the image of the Daleks. This unfortunately led to a period of the show's writers being forced by executive mandate to create monsters and worlds designed to be "memorable". This resulted in a slew of forgettable monsters such as the Voord and the Mechanoids and spectacularly rubbish-looking monsters such as the Krotons, Zarbi and Menoptera-Optera, most of which would copy the Dalek formula with some combination of 1) a rather garish design, 2) a distinctive speech quirk such as Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable, Robo Speak, Sssssnake Talk, etcetera that children were intended to imitate in the playground, and 3) very long serials introducing them and going into a lot of depth about their planet and culture (to create spinoff children's book opportunities). None of these forced attempts to create mascots were ever as effective as the Daleks, or the Cybermen (who were not designed to be anything other than terrifying), although it's worth noting that the Zarbi in particular were very popular at the time.

Part of the reason the show was ReTooled into a Tuxedo and Martini-influenced spy series in the early 1970s was so that they could sell model kits and tin toys based on the Doctor's obligatory Cool Cars.

One of the reasons Robot Dog K-9 was added to the cast was because, as a Kid-Appeal Character, it was easy to sell toys of him. Tom Baker has claimed in interviews that he strongly disliked that about the character, as he felt the Doctor role had something of a messianic feel to it and it served as a constant reminder that he was just making commercial, money-hungry television.

There is supposedly a mandate in the new series that every episode has to feature a Monster of the Week which could potentially create toy opportunities. If that's the case, this does some damage to the straightfoward drama "Father's Day", which is just about Rose trying to change her own past; the Clock Roaches are quite obviously forced in and only appear in that one episode despite many later stories involving paradoxes that the Reapers should be summoned by. It also hurts "The Woman Who Lived"; the quiet story of the Doctor and Ashildr/Lady Me crossing paths again centuries after the former immortalized the latter to save her life is plenty compelling and could have been even more so if it hadn't brought in Obviously EvilLion Man Leandro to provide an alien invasion plot and action climax.

The biggest recent controversy over this was the allegation that the very unpopular "New Paradigm" redesign of the Daleks in "Victory of the Daleks" was done purely to create a new toy range (collect all the colours!), although the official explanation was that the 2005 Dalek design was created to be at "eye"-level with Billie Piper, and was too small in comparison to the very tall Doctor-Companion duo of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. They even got a Product Promotion Parade sequence when they first appeared, showing off their appearances and explaining their special power.

Averted with the sonic sunglasses of Series 9, which took the place of the sonic screwdriver that season as the Doctor's Iconic Item / all-purpose gadget but never became Official Cosplay Gear. Both Steven Moffat and Peter Capaldi liked the idea of a gadget any kid could pretend to have with no more than a pair of shades — but a significant portion of the fanbase was cheesed off and demanded the reinstatement of the screwdriver. Turned out that he got a new model screwdriver at the end of the Season Finale in a manner that provided Book Ends to him tossing away his previous model to young Davros in the opening scene of the season premiere, suggesting that the glasses were never meant to be a permanent replacement for it (he now uses both items).

Notably the Trope Codifier for the format of all the following Disney Channel shows post-1999 (Hannah Montana, etc.), Lizzie McGuire also started the merchandising craze those shows had. Fortune magazine estimated in 2003 that Lizzie McGuire merchandise had earned the Walt Disney Co. nearly $100 million! That's from Radio Disney's big CD promotion, books based on the episodes being sold, mystery books starring Lizzie (much in the same vein as the Mary Kate And Ashley Olson mystery books), Tokyo POP manga adaptations, bed sheets, Barbie dolls, board games, and The Movie.

Tokusatsu series, especially the Super Sentai and Kamen Rider franchises, exist to sell merchandise. From the transformation devices and trinkets, to expensive and highly articulated figures, to just about everything else you can imagine, the success of the series is less about the ratings it pulls in, and more about the profit its toys make.

Street Hawk, a.k.a. Knight Rider on two wheels, was introduced late in India, and became a huge hit with viewers. Cashing in on this fan following, Funskool, who retailed G.I. Joe toys in India, released a retooled, black painted Rapid Action Motorcycle and Snake Eyes combo as an unlicensed Street Hawk toy.

KISS is probably the only rock band with their own line of caskets. The late Pantera guitarist "Dimebag" Darrel Abbot was famously buried in one, at his own request, though this one was provided free of charge by Gene Simmons himself out of respect for the man and his work.

The Beatles had two separate waves of The Merch while the band was still active: the first and biggest happened in the "Beatlemania" days; the second, smaller wave happened when Yellow Submarine came out. These days, there's still a lot of merchandise in the form of higher-end collectibles and McFarlane Toys' Yellow Submarine and Beatles Cartoon Show lines.

Most bands will have some sort of mecrhandise, but who other than Abney Park have (official) 28mm gaming minis of themselves?

These little crosses I see on my T.V. Take my money and give me some of these Little crosses with lots of color and sound I'm in heaven with all these treasures around

Jimmy Buffett has restaurants called "Margaritaville" and "Cheeseburger in Paradise" that are named after two of his greatest hits. The former has more restaurants than the later. Also, "Margaritaville" has frozen food, beer, furniture, clothing, casinos, and barware under the name. The song has been considered to be the most valuable song, making more money off of related products rather than sales of the track.

WWE tag-team D-Generation X, during their "reunion" years, was the subject of a Running Gag in which they would find ways to plug their merchandise, whether it be their action figures, T-shirts, DVDs, or even their new book (now available at WWEShop.com!) in the most blatant, forced, and incongruous way possible, with Cheshire Cat grins on their faces the whole time. Pretty much every wrestler has Merch, mind, and will plug it in more subtle ways (like wearing their latest T-shirt as they come down to the ring), but D-Generation X raised parodying the practice to an art form.

ECW constant money problems led to this in spades. Rather hilariously most of the merchandise was designed by wrestler Taz, with other wrestlers like Dreamer and Richards involved in sales.

WWE often doesn't even promote the weirdest of their merchandise. BBQ bibs, ponchos, rings in the shape of title belts, earrings, sippy bottles, onesies, a John Cena chore chart, Kosher, edible images to cook onto your pizza, DX branded menorahs, and even garden gnomes. And there are a whole host of products that you can't by directly from their merchandise website or are no longer sold. WWE branded Kerplunk and Uno, digital cameras, RC vehicles, boom boxes, condoms, thongs. Anything and everything.

Theater

Cats was to live theater what Star Wars was to movies when it came to exploring the potential of merchandising: not just programs and soundtracks, but T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.

The Phantom of the Opera has such licensed merchandise as music boxes, jewelry, figurines, and snowglobes on top of mugs and tees. Available soundtracks include ones for the original London cast, original Canadian cast, and the movie — and then there are the foreign-language recordings. The sequel Love Never Dies pushed jewelry, key rings, magnets, etc.

Any Disney live show, be it the latest Disney on Ice tour or a legit musical like The Lion King, will have tons of merch.

Most Cirque du Soleil shows have a soundtrack album, DVD (either the actual show or a making-of documentary), T-shirts, program, ornaments, keychains, masks, hats, drinkware, etc. Then there's the merchandise representing the overall company, which includes all of the above items plus stationery, coffee table books, toys, salt and pepper shakers, jewelry, lip balm, etc., etc. (That merchandise is now brought out in new "collections" every few months via the online boutique.) The non-touring "resident" shows all have dedicated gift shops, and the big top tours feature a large entrance tent that includes the souvenir stands.

Merchandizing is apparently Older Than Steam: There's a Yuan Dynasty (14th-century Chinese) wine jar in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (catalog number 37.292a-b) which depicts a scene from The Three Visits of Prince Liu Bei to the Hermit-Scholar Zhuge Liang, a play popular at the time. Art historian Wu Tung described it as "apparently created for commercial purposes — to capitalize on the popularity of the play."

Video Games

Danball Senki has the LBX model kits released by Bandai (of Gundam fame). They are all in 1:1 scale (thanks to being tiny robots to begin with), complete with fully interchangeable parts for customization, weapon expansion packs and the cardboard arena diorama seen in both the game and the anime. There's also the Riding Saucer, a remote-controlled LBX support unit compatible with the model kits.

Minecraft has whole stacks of merchandise. The T-shirts are just the tip of the iceberg made of stuff like stickers, posters, plushies, foam replicas of in-game items, handbooks, novels, figurines and even LEGO construction sets.

MegaTokyo is sometimes (jokingly!) accused of being nothing more than a front for the sale of novelty T-shirts and fashion accessories.

There's been somewhat more truth to this in recent years, as the comic has suffered severe Schedule Slip, but new merch continues to come out on a regular basis and the store is, apparently, still decently successful.

Penny Arcade mercilessly savaged Merchandise-Driven properties in the character of "The Merch". Of course, they have no small line of merchandise themselves, which ironically includes the character The Merch in its lineup.

Although, given that the Merch has evolved into an unofficial store mascot, they seem to be quite aware of this.

When the first few strips involving the character of The Merch were compiled into a book, Tycho lamented that the concept was handled in such an obvious and heavy handed manner. Accordingly, over the last few years The Merch has only appeared in the background on shirts and the like, rather than being an active joke in the comic.

Wicked Powered is a Merchandise-Driven webcomic, created for the purpose of selling "Wicked Lasers" laser pointers.

Questionable Content: webcomic or front for a t-shirt business? You decide. One of the few self-sufficient Webcomics, as the author makes his living by selling said t-shirts, many of them Defictionalizations of shirts worn in-comic (Marten's TEH shirt comes to mind). Luckily, he doesn't throw it in anyone's face, but back in the day, you'd see a new t-shirt pop up on a character, then Jeph would talk about it in a newspost, then he'd have it available- nearly every other month.

Scary Go Round is also a self-sufficient Webcomic, due to The Merch. The earliest T-shirts were worn by characters in the strip (Shelley's "Eggbert" T-shirt was revived for Christmas 2008). These days the characters still wear quirky T-shirts from time to time, but the shirts available to the public tend to have a tenuous connection to the strip. They're pretty cool, though.

Loserz (when it was still running) sold pictures with the characters from the comic as computer wallpaper. The erotic ones were more expensive than the others.

Zebra Girl has "Joe Does Something!" — for every $500 in donations that Joe racks up, he posts a funny little animation involving his Author Avatar... err... doing something.

The title bar of Diesel Sweeties asserts that its full name is "diesel sweeties: indie rock robot romance webcomic and geeky t-shirt blogporium"

The Order of the Stick sells trade paperbacks of the comic, with additional bonus content available only in print. Two of the paperbacks out so far are prequels, the content of which has never been published on the web. And, of course, T-shirts.

Attempted subversion in Sam and Fuzzy with the in-universe creation of Skull Panda, a character that "will appeal to alienated youths and wannabe social outcasts" by being simultaneously edgy and cute. The subversion failed because the character was legitimately appealing; Skull Panda currently has two t-shirts for sale.

Aside from various typical merch fare (T-shirts, prints, anthologies, etc.) pop by Mookie's booth at a convention and you can even pick up a Dominic Deeganscarf. Those are typically the first thing to sell out of.

Brian Clevenger of 8-Bit Theater has a question on his site FAQ that essentially asks "Why did you sell out?", he claims (humorously) that there's no legal way to make money on nothing but his good looks.

Sluggy Freelance was one of the first webcomics and one of the first to become a full-time source of income for its creators. It is currently supported through merchandise, book sales, and subscriptions to exclusive content.

Topatoco is a company that makes and distributes the merch for webcomicers, founded and run by a webcomicer. Almost all of their merch is reproduced hipster tee shirts worn by webcomics characters, but almost none of their merch has any webcomic logos, characters, or dialog on it. It's like they're ashamed of it.

VG Cats is getting to the point where Scott Ramsoomair is putting out more t-shirts than new comics a year.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has spawned such a thriving T-shirt business for creator Chris Hastings that, in a recent interview, he mentioned that he sells his merch (at Topatoco) under the name "Raptor Bandit Industries" so he can draw in customers who don't read his comic.

Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki only updates once every 2 months at best. But watch every other week to see updates on the author's newest merchandise, and what newest conventions she will be selling said merchandise at!

Shadowgirls has the Shadowchild figure and most recently the Merv Hat.

There is a fair amount of Merch available for Grey is..., including cups and bookmarks with chibi Black and White on them

Homestuck has evolved into something of a small-scale merchandising empire, to the point that it spans three online stores - Topatoco, WeLoveFine, and its own, WhatPumpkin. In addition to the standard webcomic shirts and jumpers (of which there are plenty, including a full set of twelve troll shirts and twelve God Tier shirts/hoodies, there is a sizable array of jewelry, prints from the art team, plush toys, an art calendar that's been released yearly since 2011, and the series' utterly enormous discography of music albums. And that's just Homestuck alone - add in Problem Sleuth and you've got several more shirts and prints, plus two books.

"I seem to have this knack for falling totally ass backwards into highly marketable ideas, like the troll zodiac symbols. [...] I’ve never actually put anything in the story to sell anything. But throughout the entire ride, every time I turn around, I’m saying, “Oh, whoops. Guess I gotta sell that now.”" — Andrew Hussie, in this interview

Speaking of MS Paint Adventures, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, an intentionally terrible webcomic filled with grammar errors, JPEG artifacts and general absurdity also has an impressive array of merchandise. There are the obligatory T-shirts, some of which glow in the dark and all of which are hilariously terrible. Then there's the magnetic "poetry," a set of fridge magnets featuring snippets from the comic that you can assemble at whim to make something remotely approaching coherency. And now there's a hardcover $44 book that also comes with a coin of one of the characters, a 3-foot long bookmark ribbon, a "pocket edition" that's a glorified poster of every single comic, a garishly oversized "plantsic paperclip," a lenticular bookmark, and a scratch and sniff sticker that ostensibly smells like pizza. This lavish book's bar code scans as a bag of Doritos, and the front cover has a coffee ring laminated onto its surface. And not only that, but for $50 you can get it signed by the character in Homestuckwho writes the comic.

Schlock Mercenary mostly sells book collections of the strips but also sells other things including T-Shirts, bags, magnets and miniatures. On occasion the comic has a merch-related strip, like for example with challenge coins.

An in-universe example for Heartcore: The Paladin Syranon Glaed, famous demon hunter and good-looking Beastman, has merchandise based on him in New Ayers due to his popularity with the people.

In real life, the author also offers donation incentives in the form of pins, stickers, fridge magnets, and bookmarks.

xkcd has its own shop, where t-shirts, posters and a variety of other things, mostly with images from the comics, are sold.

Weekly Fan Web ComicCobweb and Stripes has its own merch department in the artist's RedBubble store, where readers can purchase images from the strip on various items.

Fark, despite being already self-sufficient thanks to its traffic generating scads of clickthroughs, has recently started offering T-shirts with the joke headlines and tags for stories featured on the site.

Until Television Without Pity affiliated itself with Yahoo several years ago (before it was sold to Bravo), much of the costs of the site were provided by Merch. Available Merch included Tubey (the site mascot) in close to fifty designs (each evocative of a particular show that was recapped) on virtually anything CafePress would imprint, as well as open stock and limited edition t-shirts.

Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn, also has merch, specifically T-Shirts. LOTS of T-shirts. Some of the other Channel Awesome contributors have it as well, but Linkara's the most notable example, being that, as he noted recently during a video to call attention to people not watching ads, AT4W is his day job, and given the rise of ad blockers, people watching the videos without watching the ads means he has less money to pay the bills with.

The Philip DeFranco Show has a spinoff company, ForHumanPeoples, that show creator Philip Defranco founded to sell its merchandise; it also does charity promotions and fan design contests. In 2013 the company got its own YouTube channel.

The Runaway Guys sell T-shirts with cartoonly-designed faces of the trio on them. The artist, Tom Fawkes, got endorsement from the Guys to draw these.

Similarly to the TRG example, the Game Grumps have T-shirts with their 'Grump Heads' displayed on them.

Jacksfilms sells various articles of clothing, which show up in his videos a lot.

Krusty is king of this in-universe. A couple of in-universe ads for Krusty-branded items have featured a voiceover that's painfully obviously a stock clip of a bored-sounding Krusty drawling out in monotone "I heartily endorse this event or product."

Well, specifically, action cartoons are expensive to produce and rely on merchandise sales to recoup their budget. One of the most common causes of cancellation for action shows is the lack of merchandising revenue needed to produce new episodes.

Word of God is that this is what killed Static Shock. The show had tremendous ratings and was even beating Pokémon, but ended after four seasons due to a lack of merchandise. Dwayne McDuffie says that a fifth season was ordered by Kids' WB!, but that there was simply no money left to produce it.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is naturally Merchandise-Driven, as the original My Little Pony franchise was created to sell toys to little girls. That's where Hasbro's involvement in The Merch ends though; everything else with ponies on it, from bicycles to board games to underwear, is made by other companies. Some of these are officially licensed, but many are not. WeLoveFine is notable for being one of the few businesses that sell My Little Pony clothing sized for adults, so their products are sometimes mistaken as being officially licensed, despite the fact that every page of their website has "for fans, by fans" in the header, and that every product page has a mini-bio of the fan/artist who designed the product.

Peter Rabbit has a number of plush toy releases, as well as model figures, playsets and a plate/silverware set. Additionally, Peter Rabbit has long been featured on a line of fruit/vegetable snack pouches known as Peter Rabbit Organics. When this series began airing, the packaging on these was changed to feature Peter's look from the television series, as opposed to the original Beatrix Potter book-style illustrations. Due to the show originating from Britain, many of these items, though nowhere near all, are No Export for You.

Despite online exclusives like Creative Galaxy still being somewhat niche, it has managed a couple, unsurprisingly sold through Amazon. There are two different t-shirts, one targeted towards boys and the other towards girls. The other is an artist's belt that looks like the won worn by the show's star Arty and includes various art supplies such as a coloring pad, doodle pad, water pads, sticker books, crayons and paintbrushes.

Even before its announcement for Animated Adaptation on Netflix, Anna Dewdney's Llama Llama series had plush toys of the title character as well as his best friend, Nelly Gnu. With the animated release, plush toys for all the major characters on the show have been announced, as well as other merchandise.

Other

PBS has been doing this for decades, during their fund-raisers - even back when they were NET rather than PBS. Coffee cups and tote-bags go all the way back, but now they've branched out to include special-edition DVDs and CDs of "the program you just watched", companion books, and sometimes t-shirts.

CNN lets you buy t-shirts with a tasteful (and sometimes not-so-tasteful) selection of their headlines on them.

Museums also went The Merch route long ago, with gift shops in the museum itself, and mail-order catalogs containing reproductions of paintings, statues, and jewelry, as well as stationery, scarves, and toys "inspired by" works they hold. Tote bags, coffee cups, t-shirts, and magnets with the museum logo are also old standards.

This is exploited in a strip of Calvin and Hobbes, where they visit the museum and Calvin wants his mother to buy him things from the museum's gift shop.

Mom: I don't think you need any more dinosaur stuff, Calvin.

Calvin: But Mom, it's all educational! You want me to learn, don't you??

(next panel) Hobbes: Boy, she fell for that one.

Calvin (arms full of stuff and wearing a triceratops hat): I'll say! I wonder if we could get any Batman junk this way.

Same deal for zoos, with the addition of lots of soft toy or model animals, coffee-table books of wildlife photos, and those penny-press souvenir-makers operated with a crank.

BBC Worldwide exists to sell merchandise for BBC programming. It has been rumored that the new Dalek designs in Season 5 were done to provide new merchandise to sell for Doctor Who.note Apparently, it's really because the old ones were scaled for Billie Piper, and the new ones are scaled for Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. There is definitely a new sonic screwdriver available for sale in the US and UK.

The David Willis-run wiki for Transformers has a page entitled To Sell Toys. Because everything in Transformers revolves around it, including the cartoon series.

Can't stress enough that Transformers fans usually expect this. Some even take it to eleven by crying foul when a toy from a particular line is not incorporated into that line's promotional media. Beast Wars may be the biggest example as, due to the then new CGI budget, it was far easier to make toys then to make TV characters, so a core cast was developed because Loads and Loads of Characters was just not feasible. Years later, the rest of the toyline got a comic series.

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